26 May 2010

This time I feel like doing a crazy and useless tutorial, based on the last episode of my webcomic and using a combination of Inkscape and GIMP I will create a space ship jumping into hyperspace (uswd in the last panel of the comic).

The ship
The first step is to make a panel for the comic. Following the style of my comic, I use for that a rectangle with rounded corners colored in a light blue gradient.

So let's do the ship! For the geeky feel I want to make it look like the Millennium Falcon,
so I start with a circle, made with the ellipses tool while keeping the Ctrl key pressed

And a second, slightly smaller, circle

Select both of them (with the Shift key) and using the Align and Distribute dialog align them at the center of the bigger circle.

With both of them still selected, substract the small circle from the big one to get a ring.

Duplicate the ring (Edit > Duplicate.

And resize the copy (keeping the Ctrl key pressed to preserve the aspect ratio) to make it smaller.

Sometime it is good to be silly. There will be always some small details from basic techniques that most skilled artists might miss like hyperspace which can be done on inkscape via its extensions. Afterall, there is a moment getting back to the basic is a better way.